Good grief. Back in the early 80s I used to wirewrap prototype 8 bit computer boards. I used to worry like hell that those connections would not get disturbed. This is something else.
I have a couple cats that were eying those breadboards with great interest. They like to "help" when I breadboard something.
One of my favorite field repair kits for the Sperry mainframes I worked on was an envelope that contained a length of wirewrap wire (maybe 24-36 inches) and an instruction sheet with two pin numbers for spots on the wire-wrapped backplane where you needed to replace a shorter wire. The new wire introduced a delay in a cache invalidate signal or some such timing thing. It was always a little daunting to open up the back of a refrigerator sized cabinet and find those two pins on a refrigerator sized backplane and take out the old wire and put in the new wire. A simple but effective fix unless you miscounted.
There were around photos of Intel Pentium PRO processor prototype - the last Intel CPU that was prototyped using discrete transistors! It occupied two large rooms and run at 20khz or something like that. All later Intel CPUs were modeled in software.
Reminds me of the first computer I worked on (Collins 8400). It consisted of 2 rows of 5 or 6 cabinets, each cabinet being about a foot deep, 3 feet wide, and 6 feet high. The density of wiring in the back of those cabinets was even higher than this protoboard.
Also read some articles in even earlier issues of the IEEE Transactions about the density of the "wiring nap" and the length of the signal wires limiting the size and speed of computers. Of course those were written before IC's came to the rescue.
Good grief. Back in the early 80s I used to wirewrap prototype 8 bit computer boards. I used to worry like hell that those connections would not get disturbed. This is something else.
I wouldn't worry more about old wirewrap boards than solderless breadboards. I have both, from yesteryear, and they continue to work. Corrosion was always a concern, which turns out not to be a problem. Today I worry about new things, like stressing the spring constant in the connection.
Humanoido
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http://www.instructables.com/id/Mechanical-CPU-Clock/
One of my favorite field repair kits for the Sperry mainframes I worked on was an envelope that contained a length of wirewrap wire (maybe 24-36 inches) and an instruction sheet with two pin numbers for spots on the wire-wrapped backplane where you needed to replace a shorter wire. The new wire introduced a delay in a cache invalidate signal or some such timing thing. It was always a little daunting to open up the back of a refrigerator sized cabinet and find those two pins on a refrigerator sized backplane and take out the old wire and put in the new wire. A simple but effective fix unless you miscounted.
did someone spot those wires on eBay?
Also read some articles in even earlier issues of the IEEE Transactions about the density of the "wiring nap" and the length of the signal wires limiting the size and speed of computers. Of course those were written before IC's came to the rescue.